John Bardeen Speaks
About His Early Years

Early Scientific Interests

In high school, Bardeen was interested mainly in mathematics and chemistry:

Bardeen

Q: Did you also do some experimental work, or any work with radio or things
like that?

Not so much with radio, though I built a “cat’s whisker”
detector radio, that most boys were doing at that stage. They were easy
to build. Some of them went as far as putting in vacuum tube amplifiers
but I never got that far. My main project, I guess, in high school days
was doing chemistry projects in the basement laboratory… basement
at home. I got interested in that from reading a book on “Creative
Chemistry” by Slosson. During the First World War we were shut off
from importing dyes from Germany, so the organic chemists in this country
had to learn how to produce the dyes. And that was described in this book.
So I got interested in how dyes are made, and I made some. I dyed materials
with it, and also made experiments on injecting dyes in eggs, seeing how
you get colored chickens, and things of that sort. Nothing too elaborate..

A First Try at Superconductivity

Bardeen's first attempt at a theory was never published.

Q: What were you thinking about most deeply in that period?

I was working on superconductivity primarily. The only thing published
was just an abstract. I sent around a few preprints for comments. I wrote
a paper and sent it around for comments. It looked like quantitatively,
it was off at least by a factor of ten or so. And so I never published
the full paper.

Bardeen as a young man

About that time I left to go to Washington to work for
the Navy, so that got stopped. But some of the ideas are carried over
into the present theory, that there is a small energy gap covering the
entire Fermi Surface, and that was the basis for this sort of a model.
But the way the energy gap was obtained was different than it was at that
time.

Q: Was this a subject that lots of people were very interested in at the
time?

I sent around preprints to people who were interested, like [Frederick]
Seitz and others, and got comments from them.

Bardeen left university life to work on military projects in 1941
as American entry into the Second World War looked increasingly likely.